Content Piracy
Content piracy is, unfortunately, big business. According to a 2010 study from the company Attributor, the value of downloads of pirated eBook content was estimated to be about $2.8 billion, or about 10% of the total sales of books within the United States.
In January 2010, the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and content industry, launched a Reward Program for its Corporate Content Anti-Piracy Program (CCAP). This program awards individuals reporting content piracy up to $1 million for their findings.
According to said Keith Kupferschmid, SIIA's VP of Intellectual Property Policy and Enforcement, “SIIA was the first trade association to offer cash rewards to sources who report software piracy in U.S. companies . . . . The rewards program has proven to be a very useful tool in encouraging individuals to provide accurate and reliable reports of software theft. We believe that extending it to content piracy will raise awareness of the problem of content piracy and help us spread the message that content piracy is just as wrong as movie, music or software piracy.”
There is an ongoing need for tools and techniques for detecting content piracy of natural language text documents, including but not limited to eBook documents and news articles.
The following references are also believed to represent the state of the art:
U.S. Pat. No. 5,613,014 to Eshera, et al.;
U.S. Pat. No. 5,953,415 to Nielsen;
U.S. Pat. No. 6,363,381 to Lee, et al.;
U.S. Pat. No. 6,396,921 to Longster;
US Published Patent Application 20030074183 of Eisele;
US Published Patent Application 2006/0285172 of Hull, et al.;
US Published Patent Application 2008/0033913 of Winburn; and
Korean Patent Application 20020009077 of Kim Whoi Yul, et al.